Well, would you look at that. The bench is giving up points even to this scrub team.

At this point my only guess is that Brad is trolling us all with these continued dumb rotations with the bench. Does anyone really believe that a Larkin, Rozier, Smart, Theis, and Al lineup will work out there? Ugh, at least have one of Brown or Tatum out there, too.

It really should not be this difficult.

I think a lot of coaches look (stubbornly) at the long game, meaning he wants this unit to figure it out come playoffs. And he seems to have emphasized limiting starters' mins to be healthy for the playoffs. I remember IT mentioning that right before the playoffs last year.

Well, would you look at that. The bench is giving up points even to this scrub team.

At this point my only guess is that Brad is trolling us all with these continued dumb rotations with the bench. Does anyone really believe that a Larkin, Rozier, Smart, Theis, and Al lineup will work out there? Ugh, at least have one of Brown or Tatum out there, too.

It really should not be this difficult.

I think a lot of coaches look (stubbornly) at the long game, meaning he wants this unit to figure it out come playoffs. And he seems to have emphasized limiting starters' mins to be healthy for the playoffs. I remember IT mentioning that right before the playoffs last year.

Sure, which is definitely smart. But you can still stagger these guys better without significantly increasing our main guys' minutes. Yeah, it'll mean fewer minutes with your five preferred guys on the floor all at once, but we'd certainly make up for that by not going on huge scoring deficits in those all/primary bench lineups.

This is especially true once Morris gets back and is healthy, let alone Hayward, too. There's just no reason whatsoever that Brad can't always have two of Kyrie, Al, Tatum, Brown, or Morris out there, yet he regularly goes with only one or none of those guys in the lineup, which just doesn't make sense to me given how bad our bench has struggled.